The Quivering Pens
by xXxJazzy B. RealxXx
Summary: It is easier to overwrite oppression than it is to take authorship of the life you leave behind. An orphan wants to be more than his dirty hands; a princess wants to be more than her shaking fingers. One learns to survive through imitating a storybook swashbuckler; the other must imitate the queens in her picture frames. How many bones will it take for them to break character?
1. Act I: A Broken Wishbone

Title: _The Quivering Pens_  
Category: _Movie Crossover_ » _**Frozen** | **Tangled** | Rise of the Guardians_  
Rating: _PG-13_  
Genres: _Angst | Hurt » Comfort | Drama | Violence | Adventure | Ideologically Sensitive Material_

Synopsis »

_Everyone loves a good show, but they don't care to know the sleepless nights it takes to rehearse them. After living under one expression practiced since childhood, how many bones must break to break character? Between borrowed books, stolen crowns, burning orphanages, and waiting nooses, a silver-lining is found inside the cracks of their masks. "Life isn't a storybook, and gloves don't hide the shaking, but I can still paint my own sunrise and call it mine."_

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_All character rights reserved to Walt Disney Animation Studios, DreamWorks, and Hans Christian Anderson. _

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******¶ **Prologue: A Broken Wisbone

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Sometimes a boy must die a thousand nights before he can grow tall enough to see his own horizon.

"Cry. Please cry, Eugene. She will stop beating you when you _cry_."

There were two cries heard then: the cry of a whipped child, which shook walls, and the cry of an angry nun, which shook demons.

"You wretched boy! You_ wretched_, despicable _ingrate_!"

Rats scattered as a lantern was thrown down and shattered.

"You've no _head_ upon your shoulders, do you? Wetting the bed at all hours of the night and carrying on as you do! My bones are weak; my hands wrinkled! How much more must you _wring_ out of me before I'm in the grave? I don't have the young skin that you can so merrily skip around in!"

Tears hit his toes, making the scabs damp.

"Pull up your britches! I've finished with you, haven't I?!"

Shaking, the boy pulled them up. Every bone in his body felt like a broken tooth; every muscle a bleeding gum cleaved open by scalpels and knives.

"Hurry yourself! By the time you're through, the crayfish will be singing in the mountains!"

His trembling knees wouldn't unbend and the back wouldn't straighten. The burns were too hot, the flesh too raw, and when he reached around to touch the whip's singes, he felt where it had peeled back the meat of his skin. He tried to cry out, but the nun held him down and bore his whipped back to her audience.

"Take a long look at the canvas and examine it thoroughly," she hissed. "These are the consequences of your noble peer's actions, so let this be a _lesson_ for the _rest of you_."

The small huddle of children on the stairwell were speechless with horror. His back was zigzagged in red welts, tattered like torn cloth between older scars that crisscrossed his spine in a zipper of stitches. They sobbed out of their terrified minds, "_I don't want to die!"_ and "_I want Papa!"_ frothing out of slobbery mouthes until voices and pleas wadded together, but one much smaller than the rest made tidal waves in the nun's conscience:

"_Mother_, why is this done to us?"

The nun's mouth was shut into silence as she scrutinized every dark head in the group. "Stop hiding her; _show her_ to me."

Children cleared for her one by one, revealing the tiny child who stood in the heart of them like a _Messiah_ before parting seas. Her goldilocks hung from her scalp in mats, the grey nightgown stained with pudding, but the eyes were as new and pleading as a baby bird's.

"Do...you not like us...?" The girl's voice was wet with tears. "Is it because Papas were _Kraut_ and Mamas were _Norsk_?" She said the terms with innocence, having only been educated by the ignorance spoken around her.

The dragoness in cloak and veil answered with nightmarish propaganda: "It is neither my nor your fault that you are all _othered_ by Arendelle like unwanted stepchildren. It is explicitly the fault of your sinning parents, and by no one's doing but their own, your very bodies have been born for whips and chains."

"Mother Superior!"

Her tyranny stopped at the cry of the little nun who'd told the beaten boy to cry. The girl's eyes were bright with fright and fight, but when the old face came forward and loomed over her candle, the bravery fell apart, and she tripped back on her fear:

"_Mother_," she bowed from the waist, voice smaller than a flea's: "Forgive me, but I...I heard the older orphans waking in their rooms―"

_"Sister_ Jensen..." The senior's face was a gargoyle's in the candlelight, all its shadows hard and sharp like jagged mountains. "You are new; until I ask for your assistance, you will hold no further opinion under my authority. Is that quite reasonable to you?"

The young girl shook, with a quiet nod, in the sweat of her own inferiority, and submitted herself as the lesser woman. "Forgive me, _Mother_...I didn't mean―"

_"_Good_._" The senior's leather whip was rolled up and dropped into the junior's hand. "Now _you_ will take this and do in the next orphan while I escort this _Kraut_ to his dorm. Is that...quite _reasonable_ to _you_?"

"Yes, Mother." The young nun dabbed her forehead with her handkerchief, quivering like a leaf. "However, I...initially thought to fetch new bed sheets for the...boy?"

"New bed sheets?"

"Why, y―yes, Mother. Since his bed sheets still have urine on them, I assumed―"

"You assumed nonsense. This _Kraut_ will be _sleeping_ in them just as they _are_."

"P―...Pardon?"

"Sister Jensen, war children do not learn without rigid _discipline_. The dirty blood _sewered_ into them by foreigners and traitors gives them a mental retardation for which there is no rearing, and you are naive to think otherwise. These practices have not been outlawed inside this orphanage, so it would do you well to familiarize yourself with your environment."

Strands of mucus dripped from Eugene's nostrils as he shook from whence he stood. The children at the stairwell had the frightened eyes of birds and rabbits caged in a slaughterhouse, but not a single one said anything, not even the little _Messiah._

Looking all around the faces in the hall, the senior seemed to blink a wetness―_a humanness_―out of her eyes before turning to the boy. "Come, child. You are to be returned to your room."

The orphan scrubbed the mucus off his nose with the heel of his palm and slipped back into his clothes one wince at a time. When impatience gained on her before he could get a gain on it, the nun grabbed him by the shoulder and led him to the exit. Children dispersed and hid behind their neighbors as the nun's shadow darkened the floor. Eugene glanced at the junior nun from his shoulder with watering eyes; she watched him with unshed tears on her own, but as his face passed the corner, her eyes slipped into a hard, pitying shut, and she turned around to summon the next orphan with the whip in her hand.

"You will sleep in your sheets for a week," Mother Superior instructed. "If we catch you cleaning them, you will be whipped every night for a week more."

He was too tired to care. To hurt. To think. He hobbled beside her with half-dead ankles and half-alive legs; palm following the wall, eyes gone out _(What was ever in them?)._

"You will be bathroom monitored by Gottmar. Quality time should warm you two up to each other."

He knew _something_ had been in him, because it had gone _out_ of him like candlelight blown out by evil breaths. He did not know what, but he felt that the nun called _Mother_ knew it, and _Mother_ would have him know it before long.

"Have you learned your lesson?"

The closer they got to the room, the closer he felt to a final moment in his life, but they were no slideshows or vignette images worth remembering to flashback on.

"_Have_ you _learned_ your _lesson_, Eugene?" The hand on his shoulder began to squeeze it.

Her voice became something of a fist around his throat, so he whispered, "Yes," with eyes full of nothing. When they reached the dorm, the door was wide open and waiting for him. The senior nun, like the reaper of the child, stopped him at the foot of it. "Remember, _Fitzherbert_, you were put here because you were bad and your mother hated you."

He blinked back tears and fog as his mind worked to process the information that was being pipelined to his brain.

"You are bad because your father was bad. Your father was a dog of the enemy's army, and he abandoned your mother after war because he neither wanted you nor her."

He pushed the tears back as best he could; swallowed the salt, the breaking, the hurt, the heart-in-throat agony, but there was no getting away from what his ears could not un-hear. Her words left deeper burns than the whip, shrinking him into the tiny nothing he was told to know of himself, and at the end of it all, his eggshell heart now knew the thing that had gone out of him: _worth._

Mother Superior whispered into his ear: "Go to bed, Fitzherbert."

...And he walked into the room of sleeping boys, crawled into his bed, threw the covers over him, and sobbed until his diaphragm collapsed.

She watched him break from the doorway, eyes glowing in the dark like a cat's. With satisfaction, the door was eased shut, and Eugene was left in the darkness with the sick _-crack-_ of his ribs breaking in on his own heart.

"...Eugene?" A voice trembled in the dark. "_Eugene_!"

Eugene's shoulders shook as he sobbed and wailed; coughing sobs up, slurping them back, slurping them out, in, then out―

"_Eugenius_!" The boy calling him picked off a piece of bread from under his blanket. "Pssst! _Eugene_! You want some _bread_? I stole it from that ol' turkey neck Mother _Stu'perior_! Been saving it since Tuesday, I have! You want some?"

Eugene's eyelashes were so sticky that he couldn't peel them apart to look at the boy, whose bed was facing the opposite end. He could only see the beginnings of toenails and dirty feet hanging off the mattress. "I 'on't want _nuttin'_..." he sniffled and hiccuped, dragging his sleeve under his nose.

"...I'm offerin' because I heard you _scream_, Eugene...and you ain't _never_ let y'self scream all the time you been here..."

The crying boy's lips were pasty with saliva as he tried to part them to gurgle out, "Go to _sleep_, Stig. M'back _h-hurts_..."

The younger orphan made a face. Keeping his next thoughts to himself, he turned on his side and tucked down in his sheets, giving the boy one last glance before facing the other way. "...'Night, Eugene. I'ma give you tha' bread in the mornin'..."

The older orphan sighed, rolling over to face the window. The moon's face was full and smiling; perhaps the only thing that did every night. "...Star _light_, star _bright_," he muffled, thumb under his teeth; pillow squeezed to his cheek as tears made tracks down his cheeks. "I wish I may, I wish I _might_...h―have the wish I wish tonight..."

He closed his eyes, placed his fingers on the lids, and forced his aching bones to dream.

* * *

**Glossary**

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**(1) Kraut:** a derogatory term for a German person; often used for war children.

**(2) Norsk:** a Norwegian person.

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**Author's Note**

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The story has a loose theme about people creating "characters within themselves" as ways to emotionally survive life as they have it, even at the risk of avoiding their truths, _(I.E. Eugene's Flynn Rider and Elsa's "Queenly Mask." Both are imitations of their own creations, making Eugene and Elsa the only self-made stageplayers in Disney animation._ _They choose to disappear between the lines and be the ink in their scripts rather than the flesh they live in)._

However, my drive was the history between Norway and Germany with war children in orphanages. Tangled ("Germany") and Frozen ("Norway") are crossed over in the Frozen film; Eugene's orphanage experience was a "downer sob story," so it's ironic. As a rule, the depiction of war children in the fiction is only inspired by the former information. Since Tangled is "not really" Germany and Frozen is "not really" Norway, Arendelle and Corona are their own fictional locations, but certain aspects of their cultures are Norwegian and German in this draft.

"Fitz" means "**(a term for fatherless sons)**," by the way. So Eugene's canon name is literally, "Eugene, the bastard son of Mr. Herbert." O' Disney?


	2. Act II: A Torn Liver

** I. A Torn Liver**

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_Gentlemen of the Privy Council,_

_Tonight will mark the 5th anniversary of Arendelle's liberation from enemy occupation. __Lanterns will be raised to guide our country's lost children home and veterans will be reminded of their freedom. Alas, such a tradition has done a little ways more to remind me of the liberty denied from my own blood, and the shackles I have worn on my conscience ever since. The voice of virtue, my duty as a brother, and my desire to have your help, have led me to address you all together. I rely on your affection for me, as both your King and your Gabrielle, to grant me this closure._

_I take up my pen in the hour of liberation, and ask you now to recall the century my sister replaced her crown with a saint's veil. She was groomed for marriage since delivery, preened to be sold like fabric to Corona's King for national gain. My father, King Olaf II, who I loved dearly, taught her that a mouth closed in silence was a pretty one. As a result, she concealed her truths, placing her tears in her napkins and folding them under the table before family members were seated. I can not disclose the genesis of her detachment, but it is clear that, during those evenings, she was not honest with any of us._

_We would only come to find out much later that her heart of hearts had been betrothed to a love our parents did not arrange for her: Our Savior, the Immortal Groom. On the day of her marriage, she fled the castle and hid in a convent, begging the abbess to tonsure her; I'm most certain that it was not an easy perusasian, but the love for Our Father has never been turned away even at the sword of a king. From that day forward, my sister, Princess Estine, was accepted among the abbess ranks with the title of Saint Ethel. Her informal actions were embraced by my mother, shunned by my father, and damned by King Lothair, putting the alliance between Arendelle and Corona under fire. I, in particular, felt abandoned by my last living sibling; while time brought as much forgiveness as it could, this seemed the prelude to our downfall._

_During the first invasion of our country, her convent was turned into an infirmary for the sick and wounded, taking in all and every. She often sent letters to my wife and my wife only, making paragraphs and novellas about the the drudgeries she experienced in Grunvor. According to her ink, a soldier from the enemy's ranks asked to repay her with love thoughts and soft words, but she granted him friendship in return. However, no more than a month later was the convent raided and left to burn by King Lothair's soldiers. With the hands of the enemy at her throat, I now disclose with a quivering pen that my sister was violated in the house of God._

_Gentlemen, we need not dwell upon the opprobrious outcome of this statutory offense. To add insult to injury, her abandonment of the throne swayed officialdom and civilian parties to believe her a traitor who had an affair when she denied Father Sigurdsson of offing her son. Though to all it may disgust, she nursed the Fitz-child as though God himself had fleshed him out and stuffed love in him, taking refugee from one ruined church to another with the child under her breast. Today would be the anniversary of her child's abduction, of my sister's abduction; thence, I remember every episodic phenomenon of she and it as if it'd all been born yesterday with the new morning. Nothing from that first and last day she wrote me, along with nothing that's ever happened to me since, has ever been so frightening._

_She wrote me her condition in scrabbled ink, begging that I take the child, that I love him as she had loved him, but I received the letter one hour too late. Thereupon the great day of Arendelle's first victory, her boy was taken from her at the dawn of it. Of what became of my sister, I do not know. Make no misinterpretations when I say that it is pathetic and terribly galling to reflect that I had spent all my years avoiding her when such lethal events were rampaging the foreground. There I sat, churning my fingers over a lifetime__ of resentment, while she was being made to crawl on her knees for bread crumbs with her child in one arm and Arendelle tearing off the other._

_In fact, when I look back at the beginning of our divide, I am struck not by her initial abandonment, but how successfully I ignored the slow transgression of her recoil away from the world. None but I had sensed the unfilled space between her status as a betrothed princess and the unspoken words of her own longing. None but I had seen the discongruity between my father's illusions of royalty and an ordinary young girl――_

"―Agdar?"

A soft plea pulled the penner back into his home. Walls were no longer memoirs and emotions were no longer eighteen pages of ink.

"_Agdar?_"

The man lifted a handprinted forehead from his palm and glared over his papers to scold the interrupter: "_Here_ then, what's happened _now_?"

His wife stood before him with held breath and wrung wrists, batting the questions marks out of her eyes to punctuate her sentence with them: "...Should something have happened? I just wanted to know what you've been doing for all these hours. If I've..._disturbed_ you, then I'll humbly―"

"No," he ordered, before shame and stutters broke up his voice: "It's fine, I'm..." He stared at her a while, that dictatorial trait to his face giving over to the patient, loving gaze of a husband. "Stay."

His wife smiled weakly, folding her hands at her stomach.

"...I'm sorry," he resigned, shoulders all softening down. "This afternoon has been..." King Agdar leaned his elbow on the table and placed a finger on his eyebrow. "This afternoon has been _tearing_ through my liver like none _other._ I can't write a single thing worth the ink."

The queen looked at her feet, smiling under her dimples. "So I've heard, and in part, do believe...but the flies are in the food again, dear." Her smile collapsed like a bridge. "Perhaps it's a little less of a "torn" liver and more of a torn heart?"

His hands shook. The king dabbed the sweat on his brow with the back of his knuckle and chuckled, "Now _that,_ would be an unaffordable scandal. Torn livers are acceptable in society; boiled and wrung dry if they'd like, but Kings must bear the hearts of iron. Any thinner material wouldn't make a man at all."

"Because weaker material suits women and their petticoat thoughts," she finished with a shaky voice, but still rather poised in her offense. "As God forbid a woman lacked the charm of being weak."

"...Am I quite in trouble?"

"Quite, dear."

"My."

Her shoulders rose with her breath and fell with that quiet anger that so often becomes a wife who's hard up in disagreement with her husband. "The first half of your philosophy belonged to your father, so I reunited it with its sister-phrase, the one he conjured up for me on our wedding day."

"Forgive me," King Agdar's face was red with apology, but it did not reach his eyes, reserved as they were for the offense his heart felt―"but I've never tried to be him."

"And neither would it befit you to echo even one half of him," she countered. She stood like an unsheathed sword, holding her weight with the bearing of a lord.

The king sat, disarmed and boggled, in some melting, senseless passion for her as she asserted herself. She was, on a whole, a woman of passive maidenhood; thin and white like a little fairy, but the edge in her that was in part the hardness of her experiences peeked around the meekness and showed itself with a vice when she felt morality was missing from the room.

"...Darling," she gentled, standing like a daffodil once again. "You don't have to weigh your worth on the gender roles your father beat into you; iron doesn't make a king no more than a sword makes a knight." She crossed her hands over her heart and smiled tiredly, "It's his _love_ for his _people,_ and his people's love for _him,_ that makes a king the proper man."

The king searched her face with warmth shining out of his own. He smiled at his paper with a flushed nose, muttering, "So God help me for falling in love with you..."

The grin on her face spread until it crinkled her eyes. She puckered her lips against her finger, leaning in as if she were smuggling some important secret across the table: "As it turns out, I can't do much about tearing livers, but I wouldn't want yours boiled and wrung dry, either."

A laugh came through his nose, but his eyes were still a little distant―still a little star-like―and similarly dim, too. He returned to his papers after clearing his throat, pretending to page through a stack or two and busy himself with priorities.

She couldn't help but hide a laugh behind her hand as he made a true show out of looking as fixed in as his frown, the very thing that mocked his more smiley demeanor when something childish stirred him. He'd come through her kingdom gates with austerity; trophied in badges and ribbons like a shiny, Nutcrackered mannequin of heroic presentation and authority. But his heart had the soft insides of his mother, while his spine had the stiff backbone of his father, making him quick to dam up should one vertebrate of his assumed posture snap and spill out all the quivering insides that so often lie in crabs.

"By the way, dear...are you doing anything about _Kozmotis Pitchiner?_"

The king's forehead sank until all she could see were blonde eyebrows. "What's the matter now?"

"You know what's the matter," she flustered, wringing her hands again until they were good and swollen. "To allow a function like this to happen, while denying the most fundamental things like better food and extra clothing for the poor little darlings..."

"What was done in my absence?"

"I laid out my plans before _The Ministry of Children and Equality_; they were ready for action, and quite well equipped with practicability, but Lord Pitchiner gave me his beady, pitiful eyes like a horse in a ditch, and dissolved all with a speech. His influence over every man in the room is supernatural; it's almost as if he were Pope. You know him better than I do, but I feel that Christmas will have no snow this year even with my function going up."

The king held up a hand, advising her to be kinder to her nervous system. "It's true that resources are harder to finance than a pleasure trip to the castle for one day, but as for Lord Pitchiner ― see him as you see everything through the lenses of your good heart, not your eye. He helped us escape the invasion, and has been trustworthy ever since. You have made an excellent investment. Your proposal, one that was very extraordinary, has been approved with astounding reception; that speaks volumes. "

She lifted one hand and studied her fingertips, then put them to her mouth. "This is different. I feel like there's a system behind even that." _'Like some subliminal, special little diversion being milked out for all the civilians to applaud...'_

"Darling, I'll be with you in just a moment," said the king as he licked his thumb and peeled two pages apart, suddenly 'clarified' by prerogatives. "I just need to finish this before sundown."

Such a show of looking fixed in and "hard at it."

The queen glanced away, face hard with thought, before she gave him both a smile and a frown when it ended, as if to say she knew the issue and would draw the sword from the stone for him. "Darling?"

His throat held itself a moment, suddenly tight with feeling. "...Yes, dear?"

"Does your "torn liver" have anything to do with _Liberation Day_?"

He rested his fist against his mouth. "..."

She squinted and shook her head. "_Why_? Why would today be...a _sad_ memory for you? For any of us?"

The whites of his eyes were reddening, and the water was beginning to strain through them. "Love," he lifted his mouth from his fist and sat his chin on a knuckle, smile stiffer than wood. "This is not a thing I want to talk about."

"You don't talk about anything at all," she said with hurt in her voice. Before she knew it, memories got a hold of her emotions and she was up and down the room rehashing the times. "Agdar, I...the only _sad_ memory was when _Corona_ had ripped up everything it could in _Grunvor,_ and after they challenged the kingdom, we had to flee to our ship instead of answering their proposal."

"Darling―"

"Why, Elsa was born in the middle of that awful snowstorm in that cabinet atop North Mountain; the very one we were forced to hide away in. Of _course_ she wouldn't remember such a thing, but imagine how traumatic that might've been for an infant?" Her hands began talking with her. "She was barely two years old when we arrived in Arendelle after liberation; our people were cheering and..." She pressed shaking fingers to her chest, and turned to him with a slow, tearful effect. "It was the first time I'd seen her _smile._ On _Liberation Day,_ she smiled. I mean, without all that..._confusion_ in her face about what was going on and why it was happening and what-have-you―"

"_Love._"

She stopped pacing, hands practically sewn together in their anxiety.

With stone eyes, the King held his hands out and enunciated slowly, "It has nothing―to do―with _Liberation Day._"

Once he had moved his hand, the queen saw the fingerprints left on the glass table. She half-turned, eyes wide. "...Quite."

"Quite."

Something clicked into place.

The queen folded her dress under her thighs and eased down into a seat by the fireplace, coming slow and calculative in her mission to undo her husband: "So then...what it is you've been doing for all these hours that has been so important for you to miss supper with your daughters? You've even missed Elsa's piano lesson."

The man sighed and dropped his quill to hold the space between his eyebrows. "It wasn't _intended._ I had just...lost track of the _time._"

She rolled her ankle in skepticism, translating the phrase of it to be sure: "Then it's not so important? Your liver isn't torn through?"

The wrinkles on his forehead looked deeper than desert cracks. "That's not the implication."

"No, darling...it's not," she saddened, returning to the seriousness of the hour. "You're going around like a constipated greyhound. Anna doesn't understand, but Elsa is worried. You've ignored your daughters since sunup, and have written, tossed, clawed up, and rewritten letters in this study since what is nearly sundown." Her eyes were moist. "...Why?"

His nose seemed to redden and flare, hot and wet with the emotions he couldn't swallow. "It's nothing."

The finalization left a silence so loud it would've taken a choir to try and fill it.

"...Won't you come with us to watch the lanterns light the coast, then?" she trembled, abandoning her failed attempt to wrench him open.

"Darling," he mumbled. "I'd like to finish what I've started here."

"Oh..." She could do nothing.

The king tapped his pen against the desk, paying attention to nothing but her ankles. Declaring defeat, she leaned back in her seat, while her husband, who was weak from war, slumped back in his chair. She sat looking at her significant other, her mind going quietly to marbles. His arm on the desk looked untrustworthy; as if it guarded the letter from her, and something deeper.

Her whisper barely made it: "...Is this about your sister, and her orphaned war child?"

A breath came out of him then―that breathless, strained rasp he always went weak with whenever the more sensitive sides of his personality were puttering through―but he bit his knuckles to suck that breath back, to hold it down, _to dam it._

"...Darling?"

Her husband slowly brought his fingers together in front of him, and stared at her with pink eyes and the hard set of his chin. "What made you think of that?"

Unshed tears shined out of her own like underwater sunlight. "Your eyes made me know it..."

Nothing came after that. He didn't break character; she didn't smile under her dimples; she didn't analyze the folded, trembling hands that sat on the table like the last walls he had left to hold up. Just, "I'm sorry," and a hand on his arm. They sat like that, king and queen, husband and wife, with understanding passing through them as the sun began to set on their faces.

"Elsa―..."

This time she smiled under her dimples, patient as a pillar while her husband found his footing.

His lips peeled through the saliva, trembling a moment, before he shook his head and closed his eyes. When they opened, it was like a storm had passed over them. "Elsa―...she...made me think of her today..."

"Elsa shares her faraway gaze," the queen reminded, holding her half of the conversation to keep him anchored.

...He dropped his hand and massaged his eyelids with an index finger, breathing slow and out.

His wife rubbed his sleeve, warming the skin underneath. "May I?"

Eyes still hooded, he nodded.

She slid the letter over to her end of the table with a finger. The white sheet glowed gold in the sun as she held the words with her heart, bringing a hand to her mouth after three paragraphs. Though it went unwritten, its conclusion came to her completed. "You want the men to search the internment camps..."

But she could not be certain that her husband had heard. He had looked down and away, torn between tears and smiles. The eyes in the sockets were beginning to look unclear, and his voice barely spoke above his own breath when he said: "...Too hard...she's been too hard to look at today. The color of the hair; the little looks out the eyes...Don't you see?" His fingers curled and tightened. "I avoided her because I couldn't bear to see it."

The whisper was so weak, so powerfully powerless, that her bones went weak with it. She watched as his pen took up strides again, stroke after stroke, splotch after splotch seeping through the paper like little watermarks of tears. She brought his free hand to her mouth and kissed the knuckles, trying to breathe her love into his skin. Her husband, as since their betrothal, was not similar to society's paper-thin pictorial of a king; nor were the stereotypical images that his father worshipped in any way comparable to the sheer power in his own gaze.

But...

She looked at his desk, at the picture frame of his father, at all the scattered letters written, tossed, clawed up, and rewritten again and thought: _'Letters.'_

He was always so full of them, forever attached to words that couldn't bring the happily ever after's his pen was quivering for.

"Darling, please understand me when I say this..." The queen held his palm in two of hers, and pressed her face to its heart lines. "To avoid Elsa as you did your sister, is to traumatize yourself one anniversary more..."

"..." His hand opened like a flower, letting the pen roll off the table.

"Darling?"

Tears were falling like moons. The picture of his father couldn't stop his eyes from crying.

"...Oh, my Agdar―"

"Your Majesty! Your Royal Majesty!"

The couple was quickly jolted awake, eyes bloodshot and rolling at the _knock-knock-knock_ attacking the door.

"Goodness, gracious..." The queen swallowed, holding her heart. She answered in place of her husband, but not without a hoarseness: "Who―...who _goes_?"

"Kai, Your Majesty! Kai, at your disposal."

"Kai? Oh! Please, come in!"

A very stout man shimmied the door open and peeked in, shading a candle. "Forgive me, but Lord _Pitchiner_..." he paused to calm himself, cheeks flushed all the way down to the throat. "Lord Pitchiner is...here to see _His Majesty_."

The queen jumped, now fisting her husband's sleeve. "I beg _ten thousand_ pardons?"

"_The Keeper of the King's Conscience,_ Your Majesty."

"Christ..." King Agdar snapped himself up, trying to dry the side of his nose with a sleeve.

"What's the meaning of this? What's his purpose of coming down here at such an hour?" His wife whispered in his face, hands to her chest. This was a circumstance too unusual to not question. "If there was anything he needed to discuss with you, then it can be done with the rest of the _Cabinet_―"

"There is no harm done, Idunn. I've summoned him," he rasped, brain spinning like a ball. Her husband did not want to hear what she thought of this, and turned to speak to the chamberlain in a shaky manner: "Please, let him in."

''...Yes, Your Majesty," lingered Kai. The chamberlain turned and bowed to the arriver, who all but floated in.

The queen turned with both hands curled up in her lap like dead caterpillars, not wanting to see the man she braved at council. He stood like a scarecrow in the candlelight, flanked by two black vases at the parlor's entrance, gown fanning out behind him like a batwing. "How nice," said he, coming forth with his arms folded behind his back. "A perfectly quaint King's Study, and a wonderful retreat for any sovereign of state."

"My lord," King Agdar addressed, standing. "I am more than happy that you could make it."

The guest smiled, each tooth like the jagged crags of a mountain. The queen hated it. His demeanor was forever gentle, blood running with nothing but political affection, but the man looked like a gangly, hanger-shouldered, clay-faced creature; skin paler than a fish's belly, and cursed with the complexion of a rain cloud. Ghastly thing, really. A ghastly appearance made out of children's little horrors. Yet she never saw any man, not even a judge, look more poised, or more cultured, than he.

"I apologize if I intrude, Your Majesty," he humbled, parallels of his own reflection walking on every mirror in the room. He suddenly looked like a phantom moving in double-exposure, closing in all around them, making the queen grip the table for her nerves, but when he approached the desk the illusion broke, and he was all but one man with a smile.

King Agdar tried to smile back, lips working themselves until they had the right curl to them. "Of course not. You are most welcome here."

The king's bones were still wrenched loose from their sockets, but he was glad for his mode of stiffness, because the Lord Chancellor seemed to notice nothing.

With an arm under his stomach, the man simply bowed from the waist. "You are too kind, Your Majesty." When his eyes opened to the queen, she looked away and stroked her throat. "Whilst _Her Majesty_ is as radiant as she's always been."

The queen patted at her throat before facing him with a timid smile. "And...you're _well_, I see."

"Yes, I've never been better, but this weather is so terribly dross. I've never liked the beginning of winter; the snowflakes always stick to the material of my clothing."

"Materials..." A realization broke out across the king's forehead and he was suddenly up in arms about a fault in his position. "My apologies, but I―haven't properly prepared myself. Allow me to fetch my materials before we begin."

"Materials?" The queen echoed.

Gripping the arms of his chair, her husband lifted his palms and slapped the wood with a little slap of encouragement before pushing himself up. "My lord, the library is in the wing of my study, so I should only be but a moment. "

The man looked at him, half-sitting, wide-eyed and slackened, as if to mirror the king's anxiety, before shaking his head and throwing his palm in the direction of the study's hall. "No, please. Take your time. I've no wife or child to tend to, so I have little to feel hurried about."

The king held his belt and bowed a, "Thank you," before walking to his destination with military composure. His wife watched him with a flushed neck, doing little to control her fingers. Her guest saw the king past the doorframe before turning to the queen, warm as a pope.

Her chest filled like an air balloon as he stared; the little sunbursts around his pupils reminded her of dead suns swallowed in black holes. Having enough of his spidery likeness, she shot up and linked her hands together, breathing out with what little breath she had: "What'll have you, Lord Pitchiner? A little _Glogg_, perhaps? _Glogg_ is always good for the soul."

Searching her face, and her form, he braided his fingers across his stomach and crossed a leg, easing back into the chair like a cat. "No drinks, thank you. They absolutely..._tear_ through my liver."

"...Well," she exhaled, trying not to smile with bitterness. "Livers have been torn for less in this study."

"Pardon?"

An answer was not given because her ears pretended to not hear the question. She glided across the room with a false grace, hand picking up a glass goblet while the other dipped a spoon into a bowl of mulled wine. "I'm tempted to have at it myself, if that's fine. Winter's coming in and it will be perfect for the night. Even the glass bowl is quite lovely, isn't it?"

Lord Pitchiner watched her, cheek leaning on a finger. He cleared his throat and bent forward, joining his hands together. "Your Majesty, I would like..." he paused for effect, pressing both forefingers together and pointing them at her―"to _express_ my _regret_...over the unfortunate event of this morning."

She stopped, glass clanging against glass.

"Since, I take it that you have always known my sincere interest in your propositions. I do not set out to disappoint you, but I am but a tooth comb in a band of chordophones."

The queen stared helplessly at her glass cup; his voice had been so lax, and the irony so well-timed, that she didn't know how to respond.

"Your Majesty?"

Wine purled into the cup. "It's quite unnecessary, my lord. What's past is past."

He curled his lip back and shook his head, speaking into his lap like a sinner in a confessional, "Your Majesty, I abstained entirely from voting against you. Why, I could not but help to admire your man-like valor as you declared your proposals, yet my vote was outnumbered by the rest, and each member finalized his status quo. Your second proposal was far more popular, and all shall stand behind that event as a result. You take a revolutionary step, you do; we welcome the barefoot, for the first time, into the castle. The draggers of such feet will be bouncing around and glowing with love nothing but for Her Majesty...as they _should._"

The queen stood clutching her spoon. Something was very off; the words were more instrumental than emotional; not as words alone, but in his way of playing them. "It's ended, my lord. There's no need to discuss the afternoons in the night."

He sat his ankle on his knee and held the foot. "I am only trying to show you my support, Your Majesty. However, I must remark that the King gave you many warnings before this happened. How will you force on ideas in the future?"

Her shoulders tensed. "I don't plan to force or be pitted against, my lord. It's not in my nature to twist muscles, and nor should it be in the agenda of others."

...His arms butterflied open as he bowed to her from the neck with closed eyes. "I mean no _harm,_ or _disrespect,_ Your Majesty. I desire that, between you and me, all be gentle. The sun only sets with you."

Her shoulders dropped as she released a breath inside her chest, terrified by her boldness and holding the headache now forming between her temples. She could brave him in the courts, but she couldn't brave him behind her own doors.

"This is it."

She turned, her body showing more relief than it should've when her husband stormed in like a thunderbolt. Her relief was bogged down to confusion at the fat book under his arm. "What is that, dear?"

He said nothing as he sat at his desk with it, only stopping in mid-scoot to look up at her.

She frowned. "What is it?"

He put his fist to his mouth to clear his throat, and relaxed his hands on the desk with a sudden self-command. "Darling, I―"

"I see," she smiled grimly. "Alright, then...would you like me to leave you two gentleman at it?" Whatever "it" may be.

He nodded, voice soft with his gratitude, "Yes, darling. That would be fitting."

Gripping her goblet, she reluctantly sat it on the counter and placed her hands on her skirt, turning to look Lord Pitchiner square in the face. "I trust I do not see you for the last time, Lord Pitchiner."

Fingers arranged in a triangle, he closed his eyes and bowed his head again. "It has been a great honor, Your Majesty."

She smiled politely, closing her hand over her wrist with a brief pressure, and followed her shadow out the door. As soon as the door was closed, and the silence clicked shut around them―

―"_Valley of the Living Rock_; an artful index on mystical little trolls, fearlings, and all the stardust in between," Lord Pitchiner summarized, having skimmed the title of the book at the king's elbow. With slow deliberation, he flicked his eyes up to the secondary importance, which was the king's face. "My book has been keeping you company, I see."

Both sitters looked estranged, one's eyes narrowing in the dark like glowing moons while the other sat like a tragic hero. The latter moved first, walking across the room and accompanying the window without a word.

"That book has been a good friend to me, Your Majesty. I hope it has been just as good of a friend to you."

The king stood looking at the kingdom below him out of half-closed eyes; jaw hard, hands in fists, and heart just as twisted.

Lord Pitchiner's twiddling thumbs suddenly stilled. "...What ails you, my King?"

It was plain that the king detested his own thoughts, because there was a darkness in his face that had not been there before. "Are you aware that my sister was abducted with her son in the same hour we speak?"

"Ab-_ducted_?" His guest whispered under his breath in a crisp, perfect rage as his face twisted up in disgust. "Foreign monstrosities. They are all vile orges―"

"It was the _people_," the king silenced. "The _people_ took my sister and her son."

"Of _Arendelle_?" There was a touch of insolence in the man's disbelief, but the king didn't weed it out. "The people of_Arendelle_ did it? I thought the records confirmed that she left Arendelle before the second war, my King."

A bitter laugh came huffing out of him. "Confirmed that she―..." The king tilted his head back with the rise and fall of his shoulders. "...I...need your assistance."

At this, Lord Pitchiner gentled. "There is no task that I am not capable of doing to oblige you, Your Majesty. How may I be of service? I grant you the whole thing, loyalty and expertise alike." But then the oath changed into a question, albeit one less willing: "...Does it concern the matter of Princess Estine?"

"No." King Agdar's hands met at his back. "This concerns my daughter, Elsa."

* * *

**Crossovers Present: **Rise of the Guardians: **Pitch** (full canon name **Kozmotis Pitchiner**).


	3. Act III: Choke

**II. Choke **

* * *

"It's _Liberation Day_!"

Eugene paled. The broth in his mouth was immediately spat back into his bowl and reviled as poison.

"Not this," whined the orphan beside him, practically screaming Eugene's thoughts like an avatar. "Please, Sister Jensen!" The boy turned to the table of nuns with tears up to his eyes. "I don't want to celebrate this―"

"Quiet!" the fattiest one answered. "We'll have none of your blasphemies today!" She patted her mouth dry with a napkin and pointed her breadstick at him. "Bett'ar do what you know best and keep yer' head down befar' you allow any foulness like t'at to come outta yer' mouth again!"

Eugene's table looked on in horror and hunger, unable to part from the grand feast laid out before the nuns in their corner of the cafeteria. The junior nun who had been addressed paddled a spoon around the vegetables in her soup, making the most of her indifference, even if it was false.

"Old Scottish sellout; she knows the whole thing is a perfectly monstrous conspiracy," whispered the boy at his left, quite mature in his vernacular. "This orphanage is a cabal, and foreign hens like her wouldn't celebrate it if they didn't have whips coming down their backs―"

"You there! What t'ar ya' saying? Do you want to share it wit' the res' of the cafeteria?"

The boy stared at her with a fist to his mouth, before clearing his throat and folding his napkin across his lap.

"...T'at's what I thought." The potbellied nun put her hands on her hips and searched the cafeteria with one eye. With a meanness trained through fifty years to terrify, she hollered, "Go _back_ to yer _breakfast._"

Spoons and bowls clattered as sips and smacks filled the silence in the cafeteria. Eugene sighed and palmed his tears away, trying to stomach his meal; every time that she-hog yelled, his nervous system was shaken out of health.

"_Liberation Day_!" Children started up, sitting their elbows on the tables to talk behind their hands. "I con't v'ait to see the lanterns!"

"But we 'ave to spend it with the likes of _them._"

"The nuns?"

"The bastard children of 'da _traitors._"

Eugene licked the broth around his chin, hesitantly showing his eyes to the group in front of him. Neighbors were dropping whispers in one another's ears and passing insults around the table like notes, chanting, "His dad is the reason my dad is dead," before glaring at him. The pushover of a boy curled an arm around his head and his bowl, as if his whole society were now protected by a wall.

"Don't _look_ at him," berated girls who were half in love with him, yet far too besides themselves with political correctness to parade it. "Don't even brush _hands_ with him! He's filth!"

Eugene knuckled a tear off his nose, slumping down in his seat as to not be seen. His nerves couldn't brave being sized up by others and picked apart by their eyes. They made him painfully aware of every fault inside his body, every flaw inside his DNA, his veins, his personality. No one knew him, and he did not want to be known; to shave off his skin and zip himself up in someone else's body was a dream that would sleep in his brain even after waking. The image freed him of his grimy, poverty-sooted flesh and worthless chicken-bones, followed by an incision on the brain that would slice off every nerve-ending that made him so terribly sensitive.

"Enough of this. I don't v'ant to sit here anymore," declared the ringleader of the conversation.

Table mates moved with him, taking their egos to more like-minded territory. Orphans who were either foreign, native, or in-between began to divide themselves in the cafeteria, making their own re-adaptation of the country's rifts and tiffs. Eugene scrutinized them carefully ― the way of ignorance, the way of being. Their eyes reflected nothing but their corruptions, which were all carefully manufactured by adults. Even little Stig, Eugene's only ally, distanced himself to avoid being caught on the wrong side of the segregation.

The other war children flanked Eugene like pigs in a stye, but they never spoke to or for him. Being outcasted together was nothing more than a trial that reminded them how much they hated themselves and each other.

_'Why does it have to be like this?'_ Eugene dried an eye on his sleeve. _'Why does it always have to be like this?'_

He wanted to be back on the bandwagon that brought him here, rolling through meadows and valleys without an eye turned towards society. The children who had ridden with him were sent to what the coachman called "internment camps," while others were thrown behind the gates of a place called a "mental institution," but his unfortunate batch had been thrown into the lap of _Mercy's Sisters,_ and he couldn't think of a worse torture yet.

"This day does well to remind us of our inconveniences, Sisters."

Eugene looked up and glanced at the thirteen women across the room. They were all hot with conversation, each and every one whispering like a snake in the grass as to not be heard.

"A most inconvenient responsibility!" one gasped as she looked in Eugene's direction. "They're baggage on our shoulders, and mine are too old to be carrying much more. God Bless the day they are deported. We can't keep the fights down, so it's best they leave the system entirely."

"Deported, Sister Agnes? In all the world, do you really think the great council will go through with that kind of foul play?"

"They've brought it to light, so why shouldn't they bring it to fruition?"

"What Sister Erne means to say, is that they like to be squeaky clean in their doings. The King and Queen are far too neutral on this matter―"

"Silent, is more like it!" The shouter's eyes looked like eggshells ready to crack.

"Sister Agnes," calmed another. "You must keep your ire to yourself. To speak illy of the King and Queen is _treasonous._"

"Sister Erne, I do not speak illy; I speak truthfully," she raged, just about blue with it. "They have no side; none at t'all, but the great council will not allow them to ignore this if it's put up for voting―"

"Yes, but not without a fight."

"True! A wedge in a door is enough to keep it open―"

"Your poeticism is something terrible, Sister Annvor. There's nothing metaphoric about politics. Half the country will not, I repeat, will _not_ be on their side if they choose to object."

"I agree; I do quite agree with you all," tweeted another in her baby-doll voice, trying to sow things up before they fell apart. "It's hairy, you see. They do not want to anger the people or the lords of Parliament, but they have a different mind of what is right, so they can't quite go in as they are. It's best to just look frazzled on the outside―"

"Sister Bergveig, for how long can silence be affordable? How long until pitchforks and torches are at their gates?"

"Your thought forms are vile vignettes!" The nerves were crawling under Sister Erne's skin. "Anymore of that talk and you might as well...might as well hang up your veil!"

"You are taking me too personally; I am only speaking from society's perspective of these things."

"Oh, stop it; you and I both know the kingdom of Arendelle is not full of barbarians. Why, most people here are sunny; many do not participate in hatred. Discriminatory thoughts may be born through a type of groupthink behavior, but putting hands on others is not practiced here. If any rotten apples are in the kingdom, then they've come from outside of it."

"Sister Ernes, that is exactly my point. It's not the kingdom's land itself, but Arendelle's lesser lands which are wrought with segregation between angels, victims, veterans, traitors, dirty bloods, and foreigners. So many of them have migrated here, bringing all their follies and tragicomedies with them. Any human being pushed against a wall will act as their primitive ancestors had, and Arendelle has civilians and barbarians, all quick to follow the opinion of their neighbor, forever living in fear of thinking differently―"

"Enough."

The nuns shuffled and turned to see their Mother Superior, immediately shaken down by the sight of her. She was a banshee even in the morning sun, and the women couldn't bare to look at the flabs of skin hanging off her cheekbones like rotting meat.

"Politics are not our bread and tea, and they certainly are not for the tongues of nuns," she spat, lips trembling with old age. "Leave them at your nightstand, if you will, where you can think about them under your nightcaps, but we'll have no talk of this in the cafeteria. Is that understood?"

The nuns bowed their heads as if they never had thoughts, opinions, or a single token of self. "Please forgive us, Mother Superior."

Mother Gothel looked them full in the faces that they would notshow her, and excused herself with a haggard walk. Her hand followed the wall as she staggered, the body she dragged growing supernaturally older by the day.

When she was sure to be gone, Sister Annvor wrung her napkin in her hands. "Why, she's a hypocrite, she is! She was just lecturing the half-bloods about their place in society last night, and now she's lecturing us about our place in our own conversation. Perhaps, she's senile...? Yes, perhaps that. Word has it that she spends her nights moaning over a flowerpot."

Eyes in her book, the eldest of the group silenced Sister Annvor with her hand. "Compose yourself, Sister. You must keep your personality down. The day is just beginning, after all."

"But Sister Solberg―"

"That'll be all."

Sister Jensen, who'd been absent from the conversation, slowly leveled her eyes with Sister Solberg's, before looking down and nudging her spoon back in her mouth. The other women resumed their silence and took up their forks again.

"I don't undar'stand...what 'tis it n'ao? _Liberation Day,_ I mean."

The scattered outcasts at Eugene's table glared at the girl who spoke so suddenly to them now, but Eugene himself gazed with curious, guarded eyes, interested in what she might say.

"...Are you a Scott?" a boy discerned, eyes squeezed up and lip curled back in disgust. "What are you doing 'ere? Go over there with the others; your type is 'posed to be chummy with Arendelle's natives."

"But I want ta' be 'ere with you, like you choose ta' be 'ere with the oth'ars," she pleaded, before glaring at them with an "unladylike" defiance: "I'm not movin' my bowl jus' cus' everyone else is. I already done made my place."

Her offender scoffed and batted his bowl away, causing it to hit Eugene's and wrack the poor boy's nerves. "You think we choose to be together like this? Kicked around together and made fools together? I don't like a single person here; all of 'em give me trouble. That boy there?" he pointed to Eugene. "He pisses his bed every night, makin' that Gothel creature come in and wake us up to see him beaten. As if we don't got thinks better to do, like sleepin'! And he shakes funny, won't speak much because he don't got a voice."

Eugene darted his eyes to the side of the table, glaring at the vomit in the wood. His hands were clenching his pants―

"You got sump'tin on your tongue, Fitz-boy?" the boy egged, pretending to widen his eyes with anticipation. "Spit it out, then; go on. I'm a-wait'tin'!"

Eugene bit the inside of his cheek, nearly tearing the gum. The nuns said he was too sensitive for his gender, too sensitive to survive the times, and he always thought them right, because confrontations like these trampled on what little spirit he had. The only way he could face threats was to put his head in the sand and not face the danger at all.

"Go on, then!" The boy banged on the table. "Show yourself to me!"

...With a shaky hand, Eugene picked up his spoon and sipped his broth.

"Tch!" He leaned back. "See? N'awt a voice in the throat or a brain in the skull―"

"_Please,_" interrupted the Scottish orphan, her eyes as sad as she could make them. "Will someone tell me what tha' day _means_ ta' you?" she looked to Eugene. "Ta' _all_ of you?"

The table continued to stare, contrasting and comparing her kindness to the barbaric stereotypes associated with her red locks. Eugene just sank between the shoulders of his jacket and continued to spoon his bowl, wanting no part and surely, no role.

"C'mon, then!" The girl's dragon scales began coming out. "Everyone's got t'a _tongue!_"

Reluctant to speak, the eldest of the children folded his hands and shared himself with her: "_Liberation Day_ is the free pass day to me."

"Free pass?" Her eyes brightened. "Aie! That be good, then?"

"Good? It's perfectly monstrous! The "legitimate" people in the country sentimentalize it, but illegitimate "others" are targeted by veterans sick with post-traumatic stress every year. Even the children are beasts about it. Everyone can parade Arendelle's triumphs in broad daylight and exploit its frustrations at sundown. The citizens in the kingdom try to act like they don't know what's happening because it's so disgraceful to them."

The girl's ears were too young to vacuum in all of it, but her heart knew the graveness when the other table-mates began sharing a whirlwind of stories:

"The feces wouldn't come out of my hair last year!" bawled one girl.

"We're going to be dirty before the day ends, and the nuns won't let us wash off afterwards―"

"It's all because of our v'athers―"

"Shut up! Gonna get us in trouble, you will!"

"But we'll be taken out in the streets, and you know what they'll do; you know what they'll do!"

"I hate my v'ather―"

"―March us out like ants―"

"―I hate my ma'ther―"

"―throw mud, spit, feces, and food at us―"

"―for being traitors―"

"―then the nuns will act incapable of stopping it―"

"―and I hope they're dead as dogs."

The screech of a chair ripped their ears in half. "Quiet! I said QUIET! This isn't a _bloody_ choir! What be wrong with you half-bloods?!"

The war children kept their heads down, having no defense to shield themselves with.

"But, Sister Agatha...?" The redhead began, motioning to all the children around them with a baffled smile. "Everyone in tha' cafa'teria is talkin―"

"All I hear is you all _whinin'_ and carryin' about!" she deferred.

Sister Solberg lowered her chin and looked over the rims of her glasses, frowning.

"You want a lashin' or two across that freckled bottom of yer's, gal?" the tubby nun went on with her threats, giving the cafeteria the very worst of herself. "Because I can do it me'self! I can take that bottom and leave a whole tattoo on it!"

Her spectator sighed as she folded the legs of her glasses, placed them on the table, and laid her book face down. "Sis―ter _Agatha_, you are too loud. How could children respond well if all you do is bark like a dog?"

"Wit' t'all due respect, Sistar...chil'ren are meant ta' be seen, not heard. This mouthy little youngin' shouldn't be talkin' back ta' begin wit'!"

"Yes, but they are also meant to _listen._ How do you propose they do that if all they hear is the dull ringing left in their ears by your _pterodactyl_screaming?"

"I was...jus' tryin' ta' make it _easier_ on you, Sistar Solberg," she faltered, humbling to be agreeable.

"Such lap-dogs," she grunted between her teeth, taking up her novel again. "Sit down, Sister Agatha; that'll be all from you."

Eugene watched as Sister Agatha sank back down into her seat, nibbling on a carrot in scorned silence. The children at his table wet their lips with their broth, the red-haired girl being the last to pick up her spoon, but no one spoke another word about Liberation Day, resigned as they were to the fate hanging over their heads like a storm cloud.

After only five minutes, the young nun with the baby-doll voice leaned into her superiors with a sunny topic: "Do you think we will be seeing Princess Anna on the castle balcony tonight, Sister Solberg?"

She harrumphed, nostril twitching as she turned the page of her book. "I wouldn't bet your stars on it, girl. We will be seeing Princess Elsa, however."

"Oh! What a darling, that one! She's so _very_ fair―"

"Yet she gets that gene from neither of her parents."

"That's not _entirely_ true; King Agdar is a bit of a blonde, and Queen Idunn―...well, she's not as handsome, but Princess Elsa has the shape of her face. Perhaps the eyes are further apart, and...―Oh! Here then, do you recall King Agdar's sister? What a picture she was! Her hair was as yellow as fairy dust; the mother's, too!" She put her fork to her lips. "Though, the eyebrows matched in comparison; Princess Elsa's are darker than her scalp, which is peculiar...yet satin blonde she is, and nonetheless fair. Imagine her older! Imagine how beautiful she will be? The country will have no problem finding its king, because suitors will come flocking to her fair feet like geese before winter!"

The talk from here became light, but the information about those responsible for his conditions sat on Eugene's heart.

"Princess Elsa..." he tasted the name, and immediately thought to vomit it. Closing a hand over his forehead, he passed the other through his hair with a heart that had been more soured than his tongue. _'By the time I'm grown, she'll be the one putting her paws on my problems, and I can bet that she'll handle them no better than her own two folks.'_

He had no rosy delusions about the royal party; not because they were tyrants, but because they didn't repair his crumbling life or nail up the walls with a determined moral obligation to resolve his issues. He didn't have a clue of what went on behind _their_ caste walls, but they most likely spent their hardships drinking out of wineglasses while their daughter dined in the finest clothes with the finest goblet, all shined up and gleaming like the polished shoes his feet could never wear.

"She probably don't know nothing about dirty clothes and flies in soup," Eugene grunted, the image casting a dark cloud over his own peasant future.

As he formed nasty thoughts in his brain, he wasn't able to stop his shoulders from jumping at the disgusting sound of, "Have you got somethin' ta' say 'bout our prin―_cess_, Fitzherbert?"

Chills ran from the crown of his head to his chicken-bone ankles. The boy addressing him was Gottmar, a prude fellow more discriminating than Mother Gothel, but just as much of a pack rat.

"She not good enough for you? No, that's not it. We know your kin likes our blondes; can't 'ave 'em in your own country, so you 'ave to come ovar here and take them. Well, you're not 'aving no blondes, so you beddar keep the fairest one in Arendelle outta your mouth."

Nausea was making a whole volcano at the bottom of Eugene's stomach, but he swallowed down his anxiety and acted like he couldn't hear him.

"I'm talking to you, half-blood!"

Water hit the back of his head in tidal waves. The girls at the table squealed and balked back, arms open in disbelief of the water soaking their shirts. When they frowned up at Eugene, his eyes were unseeing and shaking, like a puppy who'd been kicked in the stomach by a playground of children. If he had any iron of spirit, it flew out of him then.

After Gottmar finished emptying his cup with his squadron, he chucked it at the edge of Eugene's table, missing his hand by an inch. "That was meant for your dead mother, half-blood. A toast to all the traitors no longer here."

The nuns pretended to not see this, silent in their emotional removal as their forks continued to clank their plates.

"Speak up, Fitzherbert!" Gottmar mocked, putting his hand under his earlobe. "I can't heaar~ yoouu~!"

Eugene sat in his humiliation, shoulders hiked up to his neck. He zippered up his lips with his teeth, unable to stop his chin from quivering. Water dripped from his bangs and blurred together with his tears.

"Look at 'im; tight as a duck's butt-hole, he is. You wanna do something about it? You ain't gonna do nottin', because you're nev'var gonna be nottin'."

Eugene fisted his napkin, so much so that his table mates could see the veins popping out of his hand. They watched him shiver hysterically, mute in their disapproval and too afraid to sacrifice themselves. He shook his head, ripping at his lip with his teeth for a voice to tear through, for some voice of courage, for any voice at all―

"I'll scratch your eyes out with a wire hanger if you don't keep 'em where you got 'em."

The cafeteria was as quiet as a baffle-field after Gottmar's threat. There was no laughter from the onlookers or the bullies, the latter of which hated and instigated like men at a lynching.

Sister Solberg rose from her table like a kraken, elbows shaking with her knees. "That...is..._enough._" She scanned the cafeteria with bulging, black eyes, lip-corners curled down like a pitbull's. "I will not tolerate threats in this orphanage."

She scanned the cafeteria with bulging, black eyes, mouth curled down like a pitbull's. "I will not tolerate threats in this orphanage―"

"NEH!" There was an explosion of hysterics and other dramatics: a bowl shattered, a girl screamed, and a brown head went tearing through the crowd of blonde ones.

"Fitz―..._Fitzherbert_!" Sister Solberg shook. "Fitzherbert, stop this _instant!_"

Eugene ran, tripped, and crashed into a trash can before he could make the exit. Down went the boy and his efforts, and Gottmar laughed at the failure, telling him that candle-wax wings weren't good enough to break free from a weak, eggshell heart. Trembling from elbow to ankle, Eugene pulled off the hair spiderwebbing his face with shaky hands, eyes deliriously watered from the brunt of the fall.

"Fitz―_her_―bert," Sister Solberg growled, lifting her gown to climb down the steps. "Don't you make another move―"

"Shut _up_, you ol' _hag_!"

Sister Solberg stopped in her tracks, her face made older by his scream.

Eugene pushed off his palms and tripped out of the cafeteria with tears shedding behind him, sprinting all the way down the halls as Sister Solberg's voice chased after him. He whirled past junior nuns sweeping the halls, not stopping to heed their calls.

"Fitzherbert!" Sister Solberg cried with them. "Fitzherbert, I command you to stop!"

He ran as fast as he could to get away from them, flying straight into a closet and slamming the door, shutting the last of the sunlight out with it. Heart still going like a sledgehammer, he backed up until his tailbone hit the wall of the closet. Shadows moved under the door, producing a kind of Japanese shadow-play effect as they flitted in and out, meeting and separating over hisses of conversation.

"―Look in the dormitories―"

"―No, no, no! He must be down here!"

"He's hiding close by―"

"―I want you to bring him to me and have him _beaten_!"

Eugene gritted his teeth in terror, flattening himself against the wall. The hisses stopped and the shadows lifted from the door, disappearing in a pitter of feet. He let out a shuddery sigh and held his head between his fists, sinking down the wall until his bottom hit the floor. His fists templed against his temples as he took this moment to sob, liberated from all eyes and judgement. Alone. _Free._

_Finally,_ he was alone.

_Finally,_ he was free.

The world blurred over as he cried himself to sleep, fading into a peaceful silence without nuns, politics, or bullies. In his dreams, he shaved off his skin with a scalpel, watching ribbons of flesh peel from the bone in candle-wax. Then he took the blade to his face and carved out his future, his independence, his courage, his nobility, and gave his smile a new set of teeth. He shimmied his dirty feet into a pair of polished shoes and zipped himself up in someone else's body, drinking out of the finest goblets with the finest of clothes, free of his own grimy, poverty-sooted complexion and worthless bones. But the hands were too cold, the hair too blonde, and the nap ended when a slit of light became a burning sunset in his face. Eugene forced an eye open against the rays, waking up to a shadow that stood in the door of the closet. The black head was propped between shoulders that were framed like horns, and he couldn't wipe his eyes fast enough to put the pieces together.

"Out."

He tripped out, thrown into the stomaches of nuns. They closed around him and held him tight, eager to whack him should he fight. Mother Gothel's face was being boxed out of the circle, but he could see her looking down her nose at him, all witchlike and hideous. He tried to look every nun in the face, tried to ask them to wait, but their expressions wouldn't tell him anything, so emotionless and blank were they as they wrestled him out into the open.

"Out! Out, the lot of you! Half-bloods must stay behind the class until told otherwise!"

Children were being ushered into a huddle like cattle and swine by Sister Agatha, filling the hallway with bodies and fevers. Eugene stood there like a fool with tombstones for feet, barely budging when he was shoved into the crowd. He fought shoulders and thighs as he passed through the main vein of the beehive, trying to see over the tops of heads. The boy could hardly see the color of his own boots before him, let alone Mother Gothel's shrinking back as she led the children to the open doors. The younger nuns began passing out lanterns, skipping the few war children there were, and telling them to stand at the back of the line.

_"But we'll be taken out in the streets, and you know what they'll do; you know what they'll do!" _

Eugene's steps fell away, legs becoming limp and sluggard. His panic took shape, picturing pitchforks and pig feces; he thought about it over and over again―thinking, thinking, thinking...―staring out of the window―staring into the future. The nuns weren't looking ― the hallway had enough bodies to camouflage him ― Mother Gothel and Sister Solberg were at the head of the assembly. He hesitated for five minutes, and then, shivering, about-faced and ducked down, slipping between legs and knees like a little hobbit in a burrow.

"Please be careful with your lanterns, children!" sang the younger nuns. "We won't be able to pass out too many more, but each Sister will light them for you when the ceremony begins. Remember to wave to King Agdar and Queen Idunn―"

"And Princess Elsa!" announced Sister Bergveig with jitterbugs of excitement running all over her. "Princess Elsa will be gracing us, too―"

"Sister Berg―_veig_," Sister Solberg grumbled, lips frozen in a smile. "Please control your _sprightliness._ The children have enough for all of us, thank you."

Eugene cut the corner and tip-toed as far away as he could, before breaking out into a run and searching for an exit. Bursting through flap doors with his jacket flying behind him, the boy's eyes ripped through the scenery―from dormitories to bathroom corridors―before stationing on the staircase that led to a backdoor. He hurried down the rickety steps, dodging a pail of water, and began working the wooden latch that would set him free. He looked around for an object that would help him pry the door open, panicking when he could find nothing. The garden was just outside, and beyond that the gate, then the sunset would be waiting for him, and the horizon would be all his―

"Do you think yourself wise?"

Eugene whipped around in a sweat, eyes zigzagging the room before landing on the nimble little figure cloaked under gown and veil. "S...Sister Jensen..."

Her chin was pocked in dimples. "Do you think yourself wise...for putting me in this situation?" The nun's face was tighter than a twisted muscle, and her throat was red with veins.

"No, I―...I-I..." He didn't know what she meant, what to say, what to do; he just wanted to stay alive.

"They have eyes, _all_ around...crawling in the walls like little _nightmares,_" she spluttered, spit filming the corners of her mouth.

"Please," he begged, finding her mad. "Let me _go!_ I can't take it here anymore!"

She watched his eyes with a teary light behind her own, before drawing in a breath, and yelling until the veins popped out of her forehead: "Mother_Superior!_ Mother _Superior!_ Mother _Superior!_"

"NO―"

"Mother _Superior!_ Mother―"

"You _impudent_ CHILD!" Sister Solberg came stumbling down the steps, out of breath and out of patience. "What is the meaning of this, girl?! What business do you have down here?"

She dropped her breath and turned her head away as if snapping out of a fever, holding her forehead to choke out: "The _Fitzherbert_..." she swallowed, composed herself, and started over: "The Fitzherbert child was trying to elude you."

Sister's Solberg's face rotated, stilled, and blanked. Eugene kept his chin in his chest to avoid her gaze. It was tempting, as of now, to fold up into a ball and dissolve on the floor, but he knew he'd have to brave the next few moments.

"Speak plainly, boy. What is your explanation?"

The boy's lips curled back around his teeth. "I jus'..."

"_What?_"

"I-I jus'..."

"Speak _up._"

Tears ran down the walls of his nose and dripped off the ball of his throat. "...I jus' wanted to be _free_..."

"..." Sister Jensen looked at Sister Solberg with a hand over her mouth.

A bony hand seized the front of Eugene's collar and yanked him out of his own skin. It wasn't the same as being shaved or cut open, but it created a momentary high. The boy was thrown into a cupboard infested with spiders and stuffed inside like a sack of potatoes, offered up as scraps for the rats. He fought and hollered as they folded him up in the wooden dungeon, and when he looked up to plead with them, Sister Solberg's shadow darkened everything he could see.

"Foolish child," she rasped. "You think you're the only one...who wants to be _free?_"

Eugene screamed as the doors were shut on him, shutting the last of the light out with them.


End file.
